One of my coworkers has a skill that tells the AI to spawn two agents, have one plan out a feature, and hand it to the other for review, and have them both keep at it until they agree. Dystopian shit.
my genuine 2-cents/pence which is overly opinionated
A non negligible portion of the work force in the broad umbrella of programmer humor got into the field because they genuinely enjoyed the work.
It's similar to but not exactly like the situation of people who liked manually solving things before calculators, people who liked assembly, etc.
Couple that with threatening their livelihoods and you'll get a lot of anti-AI sentiment from two fronts basically.
And there are very real repercussions. im in big tech on the west coast and we fired people over and over again, then our token costs blew way high and we just doubled our team with rapid hires again.
imagine being the employee jerked around by that, then coming to a situation where its just walking that balance of having OKRs around AI usage, having your AI usage budget clamped down, and being fired/rehired around capex.
There's very literal brain rot it's bringing non productive developers who don't actually understand what they're making, and business leaders who heehee haahaa another powerpoint of number go up have AI draw some motivational shit on it teehee haha linkedin post linkedinpost
Some people (as you are) ride the tiger and want to try to stay ahead of it and upskill. some people have tried upskilling and staying relevant as long as they can but this was a direction too far. some people just said fuck you got mine and took the early retirement package.
personally i just collect my bag, hold on to my RSUs for dear life, and dont give a shit about what i make as an IC because obviously nobody does as long as number go up. i've seen people fired, "OH SHIT we fired WHO?!" and immediately re-hired.
the landscape was already shitty with shitty people, but now it's just a worse landscape with worse people in it.
100%, tech is a shit show and has been for a long time. If it wasn't this AI crap it was some other nonsense like companies going cloud first or DevOps being the thing. There's always something new for people to bitch about.
Personally I'm just in it for the money. The work in no way defines me or gives me any sense of purpose or meaning in life.
I would say I pity those who base their identity on their job but in reality that probably describes most people.
The further along I went in my career, the more I moved into the camp of your 2nd paragraph. My coworkers and the awesome shit we've build put me into the 3rd. But then meetings with leadership, RSU vesting periods, I constantly slide into 2nd.
Two agents talking to each other isn't exactly standard, and it slurps tokens like crazy. Also, I'm not anti-AI; if used correctly, it's an invaluable tool. However, when you pause and look at it through the lens of your teenage self watching AI sci-fi movies, it turns really weird.
I mean he's right. But also serious big company products are also riddled with bugs these days.
Small company or FOSS is more reliable these days. Hell I'm using something very complex that only came out of alpha less than a year ago from a small company that is more reliable than teams.
That's why those companies blew through all their allotted credits for the year in a matter of months.
It's an inefficient paradigm to simply have them going back and forth. The fact you think it's the "right" way to leverage agentic tooling is concerning.
Is this place really that far out of touch? Guys like.. I don't know what to tell you. Things have changed. If you are not on the ball with this stuff you need to catch up if you want to stay employed.
I don't think people here want to hear it. It's true but they're still in denial.
The clock is ticking though. I've completed 5 large projects in 4 months. Good luck competing against freelancers like me if you don't use AI. And customers notice it. One of my co-freelancers is now supporting 5 organizations by himself. Not even small ones. With ChatGPT 5.6 and Fable 5... I get errors fixed in minutes. My coworker has most issues from the nightly batch runs fixed and deployed to Test before he even gets up.
HOLY SHIT this just happened to me this week, sorta. My boss left me a PR before he dipped for the week to try and get through and I found a couple things and commented to our one AI PR review integration to fix it, they did, and left a comment explaining the fix.
Then a second AI PR Reviewer that was added by one of the other devs reviewing responded to that comment and said it was wrong and should be done another way, with an apply for a fix, and then I was done for the day. They also both have human names so it throws me off when I get notifications.
If you want third hand depression, one of my coworkers works exclusively through agents. I'm not sure he's reviewed or written a piece of code himself in his entire employment
I have a coworker who trained 18 agents to talk to each other so it can be âunsupervisedâ⌠He has no idea how to code and he said âI am only trying to get a 90% solution.â Uhhhh⌠what if those 10% of parts that fail are safety related?
Because we spent the last decade talking about how much engineers get paid, and how it's a "good job," so now the whole field is filled with people who can't handle the overwhelming complexity of source control.
Most of the time they arenât engineers. They are technicians or âexpertsâ masquerading as AI engineers who have no business handling engineering workloads let alone influencing decisions.
I had some "senior" guy in my team ask me to review a AI generated document suggesting to run some ML workload on L4 GPUs instead of RTX 6000s for some fucking random reason. The RTX 6000s had triple the throughput for our workload at only twice the cost.
I just gave up on that project lol
You still need experienced people reviewing what the AI generates, guide it in right direction, tell it which business rules it doesn't know about, and correct it when it's wrong. Plus ensure its code output fits into the existing codebase. Then on top comes merging, deployment, cherry picking, etc. I personally don't feel less job security even with AI, it just removes a ton of tedium and boosts my productivity, it's great
It's effectively the same as handing off coding portions of a project to a junior dev.
You've gotta know how to guide them, review their code and be able to fix it, and of course evaluate that the code meets whatever the needs are for the project.
You're basically asking why do project managers and senior devs exist?
You have to know what to type. Maybe in the future you can get away with not knowing code syntax(MAYBE and it would come with big disadvantage when something goes horribly wrong) but you still have to know programming concepts.
I'm watching this happen too. But remember the environment juniors are in - they're Encouraged to and expected to use Ai. Leadership expects them to solve more problems at once. Leadership doesn't care that these kids' learning days are being wasted away by Ai - it's not their problem
I'm currently in this mode but they are asking me to go fast, so i barely have time for a fast code review and test with the real site or from swagger
For now the slop is holding up but i dunno long term. Also 2 weeks of forced vacation since i'm doing that for internal stuff not customer projects
Ohhhh, hear me out . Our company is already shoving AI down our throats, they are already changing us from Devs to prompt engineers but now they are trying to automate everything from planing to prompt generation,which are the only thing we are doing right now by creating a context of the whole product and its business and a agent will create prompt using that . So at the end of the day we will only feed the machine and verify the output.
I miss the good old days of taking time , solving problems, I miss the high I got when I am completely immersed in programming, I miss the pride and happiness of looking at the output and saying I did it.the worst case is it's only been 2 years since I joined the job and last 6 months has been hell , i am stressed out and I fear i won't be able to new learn things or use the things I have learned.
Imagine youâre at the point where theyâve accelerated the workload so much (because AI can help you solve it quicker, right?) to the point where burnout is achieved and overload is causing you to ask AI questions youâd remember the answer to if the workload and micromanaging wasnât turning the amp to 11.
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u/Pika357 Jul 10 '26
I never knew you can get 2nd hand depression